"When I was your age I used to walk three miles to school every day! Barefoot! Through the snow! Uphill! Both ways!"

This theme has become a joke, but its message is truer than many parents may realize. More and more, children are travelling by car instead of walking, cycling, or using another form of active transportation. This can have a profound impact on their health and development, now and in the longer term.

When travel by car replaces active transportation, children are less physically active, more isolated, and more dependent on their parents for transport. Our society's increasing dependence on car travel also affects children's health and safety, even when they are not in a car. Heavy car use increases air pollution and noise pollution, increases the risk of traffic accidents, and reduces the number of "eyes on the street" in the community.

Thus, car use affects children's health, development, and safety in a variety of ways:

- Reduced physical activity reduces health and increases children's risk of being overweight. Less than half of Canadian children are active enough for proper growth and development.

- Children who are regularly transported by car are exposed to higher levels of pollutants inside the car than people standing outside.

- There is growing evidence that air pollution may permanently affect children's lung development and put them at risk for lung problems in the future.

- Smog is a trigger for and may cause asthma, which is becoming more and more common in Canada. Asthma prevalence rates have increased fourfold in the last 15 years.

- Exposure to chronic noise slows down the rate at which children learn to read and disrupts sleep.

- Children who see life mainly 'through the car windshield' are less connected with the environment around them.

- Children who go everywhere using their parents' 'taxi service' lose the opportunity to socialize with other children and adults on the way to school and may find it harder to learn self-reliance, according to the European Commission publication Kids on the Move.

- Traffic fatalities are the leading cause of injury death in Canada for children over one year old.

- Heavy traffic reduces children's independent mobility. Safety concerns may mean that they cannot walk or bicycle around their neighbourhood or to nearby parks, schools, and stores.

- Traffic also limits children's ability to play in the front yard or the street, which in turn limits how long they play and the richness of that play. One study cited in Kids on the Move found that half of the children who lived on streets with dangerous traffic never played outside at all. As a result, children and parents don't get to know their neighbours, making for a more isolated, less safe community.

How do children get around?

The Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS), which is conducted every five years in south-central Ontario, looks at the weekday travel patterns of people 11 years old and over. Although the data are limited, this survey offers some revealing information. A study that used the TTS data to compare children's travel patterns in Halton and Peel regions between 1986 and 2001 found that in 2001, children of all ages were doing more of their travelling by car, either as a passenger or, after age 15, as a driver. For example, 42% of trips by 11- to 15-year-olds were by car, compared with only 27% of such trips in 1986. Children made correspondingly fewer trips on foot, by bicycle, or by school bus or public transit. Children also began to use public transit later, at age 12 in 2001 compared with age 10 in 1986.

Overall, there were more trips per person in 2001, at all ages. Some of this increase may have been due to changes in the study method.

Barriers to child-friendly transportation

By and large, more active transportation such as walking and cycling is better for kids, better for parents, better for the neighbourhood, and better for the environment than transport by car. So why have we been moving away from it?

There are many reasons for the change, some individual and some structural. A report by the Centre for Sustainable Transportation, a non-profit organization based in Mississauga, identified some of the barriers to active, child-friendly transportation:

- lack of sidewalks and bike paths on the route to school or other destinations where children go

- lack of direct routes: side streets may be cut off by highways and busy roads

- traffic safety fears

- security fears related to not knowing neighbours

- lack of other transportation options

- time pressures, meaning that parents drop children off at day care or school on the way to work

- school funding formulas that encourage large schools that are more likely to have traffic congestion

- recreation programs that are not located within easy walking and cycling distance

- lack of awareness about the links between land use planning, transportation, and children's health

Making transportation better for children's health is a complex issue that goes far beyond the travel choices individual parents and children make each day. It involves schools, local governments, urban planners, public transit authorities, real estate developers, and more.

What can parents do?

While parents don't have control over all these issues, there are some things you can do right now. This is not a comprehensive list, but these ideas may help you get started.

When transporting children, consider if the trip could be made on foot or by bicycle instead of by car.

Involve your children in deciding how to get around. Given the choice, many children would prefer to walk, bicycle, or in-line skate instead of driving to get where they want to go.

Be a role model. Use active transportation whenever you can.

Walk and bicycle with your children; help them find the best routes to where they want to go, and teach them how to get around safely.

Start teaching children how to use public transit at a young age.

Participate in Car-Free Days. Encourage your neighbours and co-workers to participate as well.

Start a Walking School Bus to get your child and your neighbours' children to school. A physically active commute can be a fun social time for kids.

Get involved in making your child's school safer for children on foot. Try to get the school to give priority to pedestrians instead of cars and reduce idling and traffic congestion at drop-off points.

Find out if your child's school has safe and secure storage for bicycles. If not, encourage the school to provide it. One school in England found that eliminating just three car parking spaces provided enough space for 52 bicycles.

Encourage your child's school to show leadership. Many schools don't see getting children to school as their problem.

Encourage community features like sidewalks, crosswalks, and bicycle paths that make active transportation safer and easier.

All of these individual choices are important. Where you live, though, has a huge impact on how easy these choices are to make.

Resources

You can find more information about active transportation and kids' health at the following sites:

Kids on the Move [PDF], a handbook published by the European Commission that contains information, practical suggestions, and case studies on child mobility from the point of view of parents, schools, local authorities, and children

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